So I've finally picked my Final Fantasy VII playthrough back up! I just finished Disc 1, so I have some thoughts about that. Obviously spoilers here.

504 reminds me of a time my old apartment attempted to graft Risk pieces onto Settlers of Catan, resulting in a 5-hour nightmare of a game that no one should ever play. The process of writing the new ruleset was lots of fun, though, and it sounds like 504 might similarly be better in the conceptual stages than the…

#BringBackLobot

Why play Primal Rage when you can play Dino Rex?

It's a very sloppy game, but goodness, yeah, it has a great sense of place. Echo Base and Gall Spaceport interiors felt like actual locations. Even watching videos now, I don't know what the trick is. Maybe it's because of how claustrophobic they can get?

There's a lot of Star Wars games I really like that don't quite fit the question, so to turn it around…

A few years back, I saw a one-weekend-only live theater version (!!!) that Tommy Wiseau mounted. It was a trainwreck, but most bizarrely, he added a new character named Travis, a jive-talking, soulful black man who randomly shows up in the middle of scenes, dances, woos all the women, and talks about chocolate.…

A colleague of mine has two Xbox Ones in her apartment so she can play Destiny with her husband; they've reported no problems.

Yikes. I was really looking forward to The Witness, but it seems to fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of puzzles in adventure games – and the Myst series in particular.

This seems painfully raw, and I wonder if that's because of, as you said, how it offers a reflection point for our own experiences… at least for those of us who came of age last decade. Sometimes when I go back home for the holidays, I'll go through my old middle school/high school computer, and I'll become totally…

That contrast felt intentional in Halo 4. Chief was purposely a fish out of water who was brought into a military establishment deeply out of sync with his usual MO. There's that great cutscene where he spouts some boilerplate dialogue about "recon," and everyone just sort of sighs and tells him that's not how it…

It was unintentionally hilarious when Exuberant Witness reveals that, while Osiris was on Sanghelios, Blue Team has literally been walking in circles for hours, not sure of where they were going. It's a perfect metaphor for the story pacing.

I agree, and I stand by my comments from last week's WAYPTW. Halo 5 is terrific at scenes, setpieces, characters, and dialogue, but there's not really much cohesive storytelling. The game blew its big chance to redefine Halo until the last hour or so.

Excuse me, could you tell me where I might find the Trevor-O's?

Yeah, the mission variety is great, and I really enjoyed all the intel (it helps that they're all about 15 seconds long). Even though there's not as many massive open battles, I liked how they build vehicles into missions in smaller parts, like the Banshee scene in "Blue Team."

Halloween is a sacred holiday for me, so I will be keeping myself occupied this weekend without much gaming. But I just finished Halo 5: Guardians, and I have some very complicated and hedging thoughts about it.

This is a cute little game! Maybe I'm just partial to birds.

[This was a really rambly, angry, wheel-spinning post that I decided to remove, but it amounted to: this is unacceptable.]

Thank you for taking a sincere look at this from a perspective that isn't just knee-jerk anger or dismissal. Unless it's an absolute disaster like a Cheetahmen, there's always something interesting to discuss. I still haven't played Friday the 13th, but it sounds like it at least attempted something bold if totally…

Jary buy gold Apple Watch